Improvements to Onshape - October 19th, 2017

It's time for another update and this one includes some very popular improvement requests! There's something for everyone, so let's dig in....

FOLDERS

You can now organize and group your Documents together using Folders. Each top level Folder can be shared with an individual, a team or your entire company to make Document sharing and permission management much simpler.

SELECT OTHER SHORTCUT KEY

You can now select hidden geometry by pressing a new shortcut key on your keyboard to start the Select Other command. You can keep pressing this key to cycle through the available selections, then press the left mouse button to select the highlighted geometry. This shortcut key may be different depending upon your keyboard layout, but its location will be the same (above the Tab key). For example, on a US or UK keyboard it is the Grave Accent ( ` ), on a German keyboard it is the Caret ( ^ ) and on a Spanish keyboard it is the Degree symbol ( ° ).

PATTERN & MIRROR SHEET METAL PARTS

Part Pattern and Part Mirror features can now be added to active sheet metal parts.

FILL SURFACE GUIDES

Fill surface can now use curves as well as vertices to control the shape of the surface.

DUPLICATE DRAWINGS & ASSEMBLIES

You can now make an exact copy of any Parts, Assemblies or Drawings using the Duplicate command on the element tab. Duplicating a Drawing or an Assembly does not make copies of the parts they reference. This is useful for creating similar subassemblies or to change minor details on a Drawing.

COPYING ANNOTATIONS

Notes, Geometric Tolerance frames, Surface Finish symbols, Weld symbols, Balloons and Tables can now be copied by holding down the Alt key on your keyboard and dragging with your mouse.

END, MID & QUAD SNAPS

You can now snap to the center, end, mid and quad snap points of arcs and circles when creating 3 point centerlines in Drawings. This can be used to detail the overall diameter of a part, for example.

HIDE BEND LINES

To hide bend lines on a drawing view of a flattened sheet metal part, right click and select "Hide bend lines". Any bend notes shown on the view will also be hidden at the same time. When bend lines are hidden, the option to "Show bend notes" will not be available on the right-click context menu. Select "Show bend lines" to display them again.

EDGE HIGHLIGHTING

More annotation types now support edge highlighting in Drawings. Hover your cursor over a GD&T Frame, a Surface Finish symbol or a Datum and the edge it is associated with will highlight in blue.

PERFORMANCE

In every update we improve performance across the entire product. This update includes speed improvements to model regeneration, opening assemblies and shaded and hidden line view generation in Drawings.

DELETE PUBLIC PLAN ACCOUNTS

If you have multiple Onshape Public Plan accounts and would like to consolidate them - first transfer ownership of all documents to a single account and then delete the unused accounts by selecting "Delete my Onshape account". This can be found at the bottom of your Profile page under Manage Account. Once you have confirmed deletion, your account and your data will no longer be recoverable. This operation cannot be undone so please be sure you have transferred ownership of all your data first.

Please take a moment to try out these new features and improvements and leave your comments below. For a detailed list of all the changes in this latest update, please see the changelog.

Remember: The updates listed here are now live for all users when creating new Documents and over the next few days these features will also be available in Documents created before the date of this update.

Awesome list of updates. The select other quick key looks like a superb solution to that very common slow workflow, I am sure it will become 1 of my most used. Copy Assy's and Drawings is much welcomed as is the copy notes on the drawings. Now I am off to try these out.

I bet it feels pretty good among Onshape team to read how different updates satisfy different customers. You can bet we (users) feel the same!

This is SO different to traditional annual update that gives you headache and you push forward until having old version causes problems with customer files not opening anymore. Then begin the process one computer at time and hope that everything works in the morning. Just to notice that you need to add hotfix which is promised to come out asap.. .. which leads you to prepare for service pack

It is just human that sometimes there can be a bug that didn't show on tests, but with Onshape it's not customers problem to rollback or add hotfix if needed. This is huge.

This is a factor that can't be measured and is not visible in compare charts: good feeling to open software every time, not having stress when you know update is coming soon.

In spanish keyboard you can run the "Select Other" command with the key "Ñ".

@emagdalenaC2C we tested several different language packs and keyboards and were satisfied that the key above tab would always be the key for select other. What key do you have above tab and what is your computer setup?

Excellent! Fill surface guides are getting us closer to full surface tools. Select other quick key is big help. And folders great improvement for companies esp. Glad to see so much focus on getting drawings top level. Thanks OS team!

I would like to leave a question regarding this update, is Duplicate the same as Branching?

Hi alex_peralta,

No, duplicating an Assembly/Drawing is not the same as Branching. When duplicating a tab, you are creating a copy in the same workspace that is now independent of the original (ie you can edit/modify/delete either one without affecting the other). All of the references of the Assembly/Drawing are still valid though, so if you were to make a change to a sub-assembly, part, Part Studio, etc. it will propagate to both copies in the same workspace.

When branching, they are still effectively the same Assembly/Drawing in a new workspace. You've essentially taken a snapshot of your document and start working on it in a parallel timeline (for the entire document). This means it is possible to work on a separate design idea and then merge those changes back into the other workspace and have your original Assembly/Drawing update to reflect that.

I would like to leave a question regarding this update, is Duplicate the same as Branching?

Duplicate creates a copy of the element(Part Studio/Assembly/Drawing) in the same workspace. The copy will have no associative link to the originating element. It is equivalent to adding a new element and rebuilding that element from scratch.Branch is a fork in the document modification history, opening a new workspace. Elements in the new workspace a "the same" as the ones in the old workspace in the sense that when comparing or merging branches it is actually different states of the same element which are getting matched. Hope this makes sense.

I noticed there are changes to the comments section as well, maybe only just the look not any new features. I am still finding I need to use skype or hangouts alongside Onshape. I think the ability to add screenshots and even marked up screenshots or even marked up screen overlay into comments would be really powerful on top of tagged geometry. Heres my request https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/7406/load-picture-to-comments#latest

"SELECT OTHER SHORTCUT KEY" is not working here on two different computers. I have watched the video several times, UK English keyboard, brand new and old drawings. Nada, zilch, no response to the key above the TAB key at all.

"SELECT OTHER SHORTCUT KEY" is not working here on two different computers. I have watched the video several times, UK English keyboard, brand new and old drawings. Nada, zilch, no response to the key above the TAB key at all.

Any ideas?

Same here (UK KB) the key above TAB does nothing, but the key labeled with @ ' found up and left of the right hand shift key does invoke the "select other" function.